Marriage Without Borders: Transnational Spouses in Neoliberal Senegal

By Dinah Hannaford

In popular songs, televised media, news outlets, and online venues, a jabaaru immigré ("a migrant's wife") may be depicted as an opportunistic gold-digger, a forsaken lonely heart, or a naïve dupe. Her migrant husband also faces multiple representations as profligate womanizer, conquering hero, heartless enslaver, and exploited workhorse. These depictions point to fluctuating understandings of gender, status, and power in Senegalese society and reflect an acute uneasiness within this coastal West African nation that has seen an exodus in the past thirty-five years, as more men and women migrate out of Senegal in hope of a better financial future.

Marriage Without Borders is a multi-sited study of Senegalese migration and marriage that showcases contemporary changes in kinship practices across the globe engendered by the neoliberal demand for mobility and flexibility. Based on ten years of ethnographic research in both Europe and Senegal, the book examines a particular social outcome of economic globalization: transnational marriages between Senegalese migrant men living in Europe and women at home in Senegal. These marriages have grown exponentially among the Senegalese, as economic and social possibilities within the country have steadily declined. More and more, building successful social lives within Senegal seems to require reaching outside the country, through either migration or marriage to a migrant. New kinds of affective connection, and disconnection, arise as Senegalese men and women reshape existing conceptions of spousal responsibility, filial duty, Islamic piety, and familial care.

Dinah Hannaford connects these Senegalese transnational marriages to the broader pattern of flexible kinship arrangements emerging across the global south, arguing that neoliberal globalization and its imperative for mobility extend deep into the family and the heart and stretch relationships across borders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812294194

Book preview

Marriage Without Borders

CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY

Kirin Narayan and Alma Gottlieb, Series Editors

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

MARRIAGE WITHOUT

BORDERS

Transnational Spouses in Neoliberal Senegal

Dinah Hannaford

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8122-4934-7

In loving memory of Talla Niang

a wise, kind, and honorable host father and friend

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. Bitim Rëw

Chapter 2. Precarity, Care Work, and Lives Suspended

Chapter 3. Loneliness, Elegance, and Reproductive Labor

Chapter 4. Mobility, Surveillance, and Infidelity

Chapter 5. Sex, Love, and Modern Kinship

Chapter 6. Reunions

Conclusion: The Handmaiden of Neoliberalism

Appendix: Scope and Methods of the Study

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

PREFACE

[Issa] told her that he would soon depart for Europe, that he absolutely wanted to marry her before he left, because he didn’t want to lose her. The dowry, the gifts, the jewelry and the big ceremony, he would take care of that right away on his first vacation back home. The young lady trembled.… She caught her breath, clung to his arm and bit her lip to control her smile. Issa savored his effect. He hadn’t prepared his speech well, but the word Europe was his best talisman. His fiancée, captivated, accepted with all her heart.… She could already see herself, radiant princess on her eve of coronation, adorned in her beautiful finery, welcoming her love home from Europe and rich with millions. Like her, her parents would accept and facilitate all the steps. They wouldn’t want to deny their dear daughter this marvelous future that was taking shape on the horizon.

—Fatou Diome, Celles qui attendent

In Fatou Diome’s novel, Those Who Wait, young Issa doesn’t need to offer his intended a detailed plan of how he will be successful in Europe. The young woman demands no explanation of how her fiancé will become a legal resident once his fishing boat arrives on the shores of the Canary Islands of Spain. Neither does she ask what kind of work he plans to pursue as a Senegalese high school dropout whose only work experience is in traditional fishing, who speaks not a word of Spanish, and who has no savings to draw on for his initial arrangements upon arrival. Instead, she begins mentally spending the fortunes she is certain he will earn once he makes it to that magical place called Europe.

Diome’s novel, which follows two pairs of mothers and wives of migrants awaiting the return of their overseas sons and husbands, is a fictionalization of what has become a commonplace family arrangement in contemporary Senegal. The book in your hands is an ethnographic account of these long-distance kin relationships in Senegal, which this author calls transnational marriages: marriages between Senegalese migrants and non-migrant women in Senegal. As is shown herein, these marriages are a direct response to diminishing confidence in Senegal’s ability to offer its citizens the means to live a fulfilling social life.

That Senegalese imagine better economic prospects abroad is not surprising. Within post-colonial Senegal, economic and social possibilities have steadily declined. Increasing inflation and a lack of remunerative employment make it progressively difficult for Senegalese men and women to find opportunities for financial and social advancement within post-colonial Senegal. Like young people in other parts of Africa facing the same retrenchment of social services and enfeebled economies post-structural adjustment,¹ generations of Senegalese struggle to find pathways to successful adulthood in the face of dwindling opportunities.

What makes the Senegalese case compelling and confounding is the attempt to not simply build a future through migration, but to build a future in Senegal through migration out of the country. The popularity of transnational marriages illustrates not a wish to flee Senegal, but a desire and an intention to make life in Senegal a viable option through emigration. The popularity of transnational marriage points to an emergent imperative to secure ties to the world outside of Senegal to realize a social future within Senegal; achieving status and adulthood in Senegal now requires setting a proverbial or literal foot outside of the country.

Despite decades of transnational and return migration from Senegal and Europe, critical knowledge gaps lie in non-migrant understandings of life abroad. My research among Senegalese migrants in France and Italy and wives of migrants in Senegal reveals a fundamental irony about how Senegalese relate to Europe in particular, but to "bitim rëw (overseas; literally outside the country") more generally. Though social success in Senegal increasingly depends on access to the world outside of Senegal in some capacity—such as through migration, kinship or marriage to a migrant, and remittances from abroad—most non-migrant Senegalese remain persistently uninformed about the realities of life overseas. Like the characters in Fatou Diome’s novel, many Senegalese migrate and marry migrants on the basis of simplistic and underdeveloped understanding about the relationship between overseas residence and wealth accumulation. That knowledge gap is partly responsible for perpetuating emigration and transnational marriage, as non-migrants cleave to a vague conviction of the immense possibilities that migration can bring.

In many ways, this is a regional story. Parallels of this kind of emigration and transnational kinship can been seen across West Africa.² Moreover, this Senegalese case illuminates broader global patterns of changes in family structure, particularly for families from across the Global South, and these changes are intimately connected to the structures and regimes of late capitalism. Around the world, global neoliberal labor restructuring combines with local retrenchments of state social services and shrinking civil service sectors to create an imperative of mobility and flexibility. This imperative reaches into the most intimate aspects of life, reshaping expectations and ideals about family and love. Marriage Without Borders is an ethnography of the new kinds of kin practices created at the nexus of global neoliberal capitalism and local conceptions of gender, class, duty, honor, and care.

Introduction

Degg dooyul ma. Bëgg naa giis la.

Jaabaru modou modou sonn na. Jaabaru immigré moom weet na.

Hearing you isn’t enough. I want to see you.

A modou modou’s wife is weary. A migrant’s wife, she is lonely.

—Ndickou Seck, "Modou Modou"

Across Senegal and the Senegalese diaspora, men and women are trying to make sense of a growing category of women, the "jabaaru immigré. This Wolof label, which literally translates to immigrant’s wife," describes the non-migrant wives of Senegalese men who reside overseas.¹ Transnational marriages between migrant Senegalese men and non-migrant women in Senegal are increasingly common in contemporary Senegal. Though some families do eventually reunite, either in the migratory context or at home, most transnational couples live the majority of their marriage in separate locations (see Baizan et al. 2014).

In popular song, televised films, in the Senegalese news media, and online, jabaari immigré are depicted alternately as opportunistic gold-diggers, forsaken lonely hearts, and naïve dupes. Their migrant husbands also face multiple representations—as profligate womanizers, conquering heroes, heartless enslavers, and exploited workhorses. These ambivalences point to fluctuating understandings of gender, status, and power within Senegalese society. They reflect an acute uneasiness within this coastal West African nation that has seen an exodus in the past 35 years, as more men and women migrate out of Senegal in search of a better financial future.

Researchers working across the globe have found neoliberal logic intertwining with the most intimate aspects of the self, including in relationship to desire, empathy, and love (Rofel 2007, Freeman 2014, Pedwell 2014, Bernstein 2007). For contemporary Senegalese, the neoliberal mandate for flexibility in all realms of life (Freeman 2012: 85) has reached into the very construction of what makes marriage meaningful and worthwhile. For Senegalese couples, this mandate for flexibility has overridden other contemporary and former elements of value in marriage, including sexuality, emotional companionship, class homogamy, and domestic harmony. Instead, many couples find themselves sacrificing these aspects in favor of marriages suspended between separate locales that provide other advantages in a changing political and economic landscape.

Though held up as a model of peaceful democracy in the region, Senegal fails to offer viable pathways to economic stability and social reproduction to all but the elite of this francophone, Islamic² nation. In the years since the economic crisis of the 1980s, emigration has become deeply embedded in the Senegalese national ethos. Lacking many of the social services and civil-sector employment opportunities to advance, citizens reach outside the country in an attempt to procure means for building successful social lives within Senegal. For many Senegalese men (and a much smaller but growing number of women³) this entails migration in an attempt to find work abroad⁴—while continuing to invest in social life at home.

One Senegalese household in ten counts an emigrant among its members (Daffé, 2008), and an estimated half of all households have a relative living abroad (Beauchemin et al. 2013). The physical evidence of transnational migration is visible across urban and rural Senegal in the form of half-constructed villas being built piecemeal through migrant remittances, representing absent migrant owners and their successes overseas (see Melly 2010). Their remittances also fund village-level projects including wells and mosques, and national development projects; the Senegalese economy benefits enormously from the overseas earnings of its citizens.⁵ Like constructing a home in the homeland, marrying and forming families with women back in Senegal is a common form of investment at home for migrants as well as a means of exhibiting achievements.

The same pressures for financial and social advancement and the disruptions in family life created by neoliberal reforms that lead men into migration also encourage Senegalese women to willingly marry men from Senegal who live overseas. Gaining a connection to the world outside Senegal through marriage can offer a better chance at fulfilling women’s goals of representation and respectability, as well providing a potential avenue to migration for themselves. Thus, many Senegalese men and women find themselves married to spouses who live thousands of miles away, negotiating newly flexible definitions of spousal harmony, intimacy, and care.

It is difficult to get clear numbers of transnational couples in Senegal, as few reliable statistical surveys exist. One study of households in Dakar estimated that 23 percent of female household heads had a spouse abroad (Beauchemin et al. 2013). This figure, however, fails to count wives who are not household heads, and many migrants’ wives are likely to live with their own parents or their in-laws in the absence of their spouse. Thus, this number fails to capture a useful approximation of the extent of transnational migration nationwide. A number of factors make collecting data on transnational marriages difficult—many Senegalese marriages are not legalized and are only preformed in the mosque; migrants frequently do not list Senegalese spouses (particularly in plural marriages) on their immigration paperwork; divorce and remarriage are common and quick in Senegal in general, and are especially so in the case of transnational marriage.

The frequency of an absent husband’s visits varies widely, depending on his legal migration status, his employment, and his financial resources. At one extreme, couples go many years without seeing one another because husbands do not have their kayt (immigration papers) and thus cannot leave their country of residence without being blocked from returning. At the other extreme, there are husbands whose work in import/export facilitates a return every four to six months. Factory workers in Europe usually have Christmas closures and a long August holiday from work, though trips home are too expensive for most factory workers to return on a biannual basis. Many Senegalese migrants belong to the Mouride brotherhood,⁶ and those who are able often return yearly for the Magal, the annual pilgrimage to the Mouride’s holy city of Touba in the north of Senegal. Others return yearly for the important Muslim holidays of Eid Al-Fitr (tabaski) or the end of Ramadan (korité).

Many transnational couples keep in touch daily, primarily through telephone calls, and increasingly also use other communication media such as Skype, WhatsApp, and instant messengers. With a few rare exceptions, all Senegalese migrant husbands send remittances home. They do this through agencies such as MoneyGram and Western Union, or through more informal channels, such as a gift or cash sent with fellow migrants making a journey home on vacation, or via particular religious networks of exchange (Tall 2002). These remittances finance everything from home construction to laundry detergent, from school fees to breakfast—and many households in Senegal depend on support from overseas to function on a day-to-day basis.

Romance and Finance

Anthropologist Jennifer Cole critiques recent work on African intimacies as foregrounding the instrumental and emphasizing the strategic. Researchers—especially those studying the spread of HIV in Africa—describe intimate relationships as transactional and devoid of sentiment. Though Cole recognizes that scholars often do so either to highlight African agency or to show the logic behind seemingly promiscuous behavior in a context of poverty, nonetheless, the effect is simultaneously to downplay the affective dimensions of these relationships and to give academic credence to a view frequently espoused by African men that they are ‘used’ by African women (Cole 2009: 111). Certainly the present discussion of Senegalese transnational marriage, in which women choose to marry migrants for their potential as providers and migrants make strategic choices about partners in light of considerations such as personal status building, could echo a similar overshadowing of affect. This is particularly a danger because Senegalese men (and women) themselves often link the phenomenon of transnational marriage to women’s materialism and men’s self-indulgence.

I seek to avoid a reductive approach to marriage and its dangerous associations with a history of exoticizing and othering African sexuality in two important ways: by linking Senegalese transnational marriage to discussions of contemporary love and marriage outside the context of Africa, and by offering a more nuanced picture of love in Senegal and its relation to material exchange. Rather than presenting transnational marriage as a case of African exceptionalism or exoticism, this book argues that Senegalese transnational marriage is reflective of a contemporary global rupture in family relations for those in the Global South. In Senegal, this rupture signals a move away from more traditional companionate values for marriage, in which love and emotional closeness long have been seen as constitutive elements of a successful marriage.

Cole and Thomas, in their edited volume Love in Africa, emphasize that, like others across the world, Africans have long forged intimate attachments through exchange relationships (2009: 13). I join Constable (2009) and Zelizer (2005)⁷ as I depart from a tendency to dichotomize or polarize economy and intimacy as if, in the final instance, they were mutually exclusive causes (or results) of transnational marriage. By contrast, this text shows, for instance, that in Senegalese courtship and marriage, economic motives and forces are deeply intertwined with the construction and configuration of romance.

Married life in Senegal has always been linked to material value. Senegalese culture traditionally has emphasized the importance of a husband as provider and, although this quality has been given equal value to other characteristics—such as provenance from a good family, strong character, and religious piety—women always have sought to attach themselves to "goor jaarin" (Hannaford and Foley 2015). Goor jaarin literally means a man who is worth something; it conveys a masculine form of honor that rests in large part on financial success. In addition to initial marriage payments, husbands are expected to provide for ("yor") their wives and children.

Husbands are expected to provide not just out of duty but as an act of care—financial support is part of what Catie Coe has deemed the materiality of care. The provision of material resources carries a signal of emotional depth and closeness (Coe 2011: 21). Affection and emotional closeness also have been emphasized as key to a successful Senegalese marriage, modeled in part after the Senegalese understanding of the Prophet Mohammed’s relationship with his wives. Acts of care and generosity between a husband and wife become the context within which a long-term marital bond develops. Transnational couples have fewer opportunities for gestures of care and intimacy than do couples that live side by side. Thus a husband’s acts of providing through remittances—and a wife’s response to these remittances—represent key sites of spousal support and care (Hannaford 2016).

What often is misinterpreted as prioritizing money over relationships—a wife’s voracious desire for more remittances or a husband’s failure to remit adequately—upon further examination reflects decisions that prioritize a couple’s relationships with others over their relationship with one another.⁸ Migrants juggle other familial obligations along with their duties as husbands and fathers, including playing the roles of supportive sons, brothers, cousins, and nephews. Like their migrant husbands, non-migrant wives face requests for loans and gifts from those around them because of their ties to overseas wealth, in addition to pressure to keep up an appearance of affluence and comfort. This distinction often is underemphasized—including by most Senegalese themselves—in the attention given to the role of money and remittances in transnational migration. In examining these intensified interactions ethnographically, we understand that money and gifts function as a type of emotional currency that both parties use not only in their own marriage but also to participate in a larger moral economy. In these marriages and in marriage in Senegal more broadly, caring, family, and finances are inextricably linked.

Globally Flexible Families

As elsewhere in the developing world, men and women in Senegal are finding it necessary to create new flexible forms of kinship that respond to the structural imperatives of neoliberal globalization. Marriage is socially compulsory in Senegal, and many men migrate with the primary goal of accumulating the resources for marriage and family formation. Due to changes in labor restructuring and obstacles to legal migration status, however, they often find marriage to women in the host country or diaspora untenable and—because of gendered and religious ideologies of womanhood—undesirable. Senegalese women, also facing social and financial pressure to marry, find that non-migrant men are delaying marriage—what scholars elsewhere in the region have called a matrimonial crisis (e.g., Masquelier 2005)—and migrant men appear more likely to be good providers. Thus, women marry migrant men, non-migrant men believe they must migrate to marry, and transnational marriage becomes a new endeavor to make marriage tenable in insecure times.

A number of sociological and anthropological studies have emerged in recent years that focus on long-distance familial relations.⁹ Migration has become an essential aspect of successful mothering in the Philippines (Parreñas 2005a, Lan 2006, Madianou and Miller 2012). Being a dutiful child in Central America now entails crossing into the United States as an unaccompanied minor (Heidbrink 2014, Yarris 2014). To be a desirable husband (and honorable son and father), South Indian men become labor migrants to the Middle East (Desai and Banerji 2008, Gulati 1993). The rise in practices of transnational kinship can be tied to a neoliberal demand for flexibility in all aspects of life, especially for citizens of the Global South. The squeeze of the retraction of the welfare state and the pull of forces of global labor restructuring engender new types of affective practices and a reworking of older conceptions of familial care.

All the studies of contemporary transnational kinship noted above reveal a common element of strain and disappointment. Though older forms of transnational kinship can be found in historical accounts of colonial life, in centuries of trade, and in